At first, the University of Chicago economist didn’t think credit card regulation could possibly work. “I went into the project with this sort of conventional wisdom that well-intentioned regulators would force down fees and that other fees and charges would increase in response,” explained Neale Mahoney, of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Put simply, how do we square that “college is worth it” from the increasing body of evidence that student debt is not necessarily good debt? The unsatisfying answer, of course, is that it depends.
McDonald’s shareholders voted this morning to approve a $9.5 million compensation package for CEO Donald Thompson, including $7.8 million (82 percent of the total) in stock awards and incentive pay intended to reward company performance and align the interests of the Chief Executive with shareholders at the firm.
With another stroke of his pen, President Obama can authorize an Executive Order mandating paid sick leave for the same federally contracted workers whom he just gave a raise to.
On Tuesday, Tea Party challengers received a drubbing by establishment GOP candidates. And today, a group of conservatives published a manifesto with practical ideas meant to woo the middle class entitled Room to Grow. I guess extremism in defense of liberty might be a vice after all.
The conservative populist playbook has a timeless power, and two of its key strategies are especially potent: 1) Attack faceless government bureaucrats that are meddling in people's lives; and 2) Attack people who look different and are changing things.
The media shouldn't be scaring students away from going to college, because the alternative of not going is worse. Unfortunately, our move to a debt-for-diploma system is doing a good enough job of that itself.
President Obama's big speech at West Point today on America's role in the world is getting lots of attention from foreign policy wonks, but anyone interested in domestic policy should also be paying keen attention. Why? Because how the U.S.
It was certainly a nice theory that the Founders had: make Congress more responsive to the people by putting members of the House up for re-election every two years. With so many state elected offices also up for the grabs, and the staggering of Senate terms, midterm elections became even more consequential over time than the Founder probably ever imagined.
The left and right will never agree on many economic questions -- like how government can best stimulate growth -- but when you get down in the weeds there are places for a real conversation. At least with a smart guy like Michael Strain, who's a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a chapter on reducing unemployment in the new conservative manifesto, Room to Grow.
In recent days the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, often working through independent contractors, has started cutting off service to up to 120,000 delinquent citizens, while giving a pass to major corporate laggards. The Great Recession has crushed the people of Detroit, with unemployment rates soaring as high as 35 percent in this period. At the end of 2013, 47 percent of the mortgages were still under water. They simply cannot pay. How could such draconian measures be justified?
Times are tough for creative people in the entertainment industry -- even as big profits roll in for corporations like Viacom and Disney. It's a familiar story, only in this case its film editors, make-up artists, and musicians who are getting creamed.
Proxy season is the magical time of year when shareholders cast their votes on corporate governance. Since 2011, the ‘Say on Pay’ provision of Dodd-Frank ensured those votes would include an up-or-down non-binding voice in executive compensation packages. If that sounds toothless, well, hardly anyone is even getting gummed. According to Equilar’s say on pay tracker, most companies’ executive compensation plans passed with 90-plus percentage majorities.
Income and wealth disparity has emerged as a critical economic and political issue for the US. At its core, it is a discussion of how we measure whether the economy is increasing or decreasing the well-being of Americans as a whole. Traditional measures like GDP growth, the stock market and even unemployment rates do not capture the circumstances of today’s economy.
The recent Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper finding that ordinary citizens have, “little or no independent influence on policy at all.” While the paper was covered extensively in the popular press, few bothered to even read the paper which notes, “ the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites.” Gilens’s data look at only tho
It has been less than two months since the Supreme Court issued its plurality decision in McCutcheon v. FEC and already two district courts have voiced strong concerns with the decision.
